since when is linux a mobile browsing os
What do you think Android runs on?
In any case, that's not what the article says. It's talking about OVERALL web browsing, mobile or not. What amuses me is that Apple managed to do in about 3 years what took Linux almost two DECADES to accomplish. I think it just goes to show that Linux is going nowhere for home desktop users even in 2010 and I think it's their own fault for not creating a default set of standards every distribution should have at its core to encourage commercial software expansion, etc. and thus user expansion.
Well technically iOS is based on darwin which is a port of unix.
Linux originally got it's start as a port of unix so they are somewhat similar
Technically speaking, Linux is NOT Unix. It's very similar to Unix in context/operation/command structure, but contains no Unix code, supposedly. Obviously, a lot of 3rd party code (even developer products) is shared between platforms, but whereas Darwin/OSX is DIRECTLY from BSD Unix, Linux is a from scratch OS that just imitates Unix in structure. Android, however is based on LINUX, not Unix.
Not at all. Linux is completely written from scratch, nothing ported at all (back when SCO claimed that IBM had stolen millions of lines of their code which couldn't be found anywhere they also made such claims about Linux with the intent of suing every Linux user, but that was complete ********). It is however quite similar to Unix in many respects.
Really? Safari is in the Android marketplace? Since when?
And iOS ships with the browser that I want
I see you beat me to it on the Linux thing. In any case, I wouldn't be too hard on Android or Linux. Apple's Safari is based on Web-Kit as are many Linux browsers. They are still closer to each other family wise than anything from Microsoft. I think Android is iOS's biggest threat into the future. It has the same advantage Microsoft had in the 90s, more hardware support and more choices for hardware. Google would be smart to make their own Linux distribution as well. That is
exactly what Linux needs (a big company that knows what it's doing to STANDARDIZE the thing and popularize it all in one step, which might then get other "compatible" Linux distributions to follow suit). A Linux that standardizes the packaging, library and GUI system COULD be a real threat to Microsoft and Apple both. Linux has only failed as a consumer desktop thus far because the developers are all competing against each other for those key systems instead of working together. Commercial software makers do NOT want to have to worry about whether you're running KDE, Gnome or some other Window Manager, whether you have Alsa or OSS, RPM or Debian (of which packages are not necessarily directly compatible even between various distributions that use the same one...UGH), etc. They NEED one ring to rule them all, so to speak. This is why OSX "just works". Imagine if Apple had competing standards for Darwin, Core Image, Core Audio, Cocoa, etc. It would be just like Linux; no one would support it. The problem is most Linux developers either don't care or actually LIKE all those choices (Information should be free man! Choice for GUI is Paramount Daddy!) or are simply unable to bring everyone together to support one common standard due to no clout (Torvalds is probably the only non-company that could do it; Google has a chance because they're so big). Of course, those same standards can also limit evolution/progress in some areas, but really, after two decades I think evolution has proven inferior to technological stability/standardization. Progress should be internal, not external. They need a standards "federation" to handle that sort of thing for the "core" distribution. Otherwise, they're going to be the "hippie OS" forever, literally.
